Slides for the International Conference "Eurasia 2.0: Post-Soviet Geopolitics and New Media", Uppsala, Sweden, Nov 3-4, 2014. http://www.ucrs.uu.se/eurasia_/

2. Cargo Cult Media
The Geopollitics of the New Media
is an Oxymoron
Anton Gumenskiy
MGIMO University
November 3, 2014

3. Myth is Reality
Myth is not a fake, not a story, not a fiction,
an anecdote, a saga, neither a fairytale
Myth is the most intence, vivid, authentic
reality
Mircea Eliade, Aleksey Losev, Sigmund
Freud, Carl Gustav Jung

4. Geopolitics is a Myth
Elements
• Archetypes
• Land and Sea
• Us and Others
• Home, Borders
• Enemies, Friends
• Dawn of the World
• End of Times
• Rituals
Functions
• Awakening
• Soteriological
• Guiding
• Cognitive
• Integrative
• Extending
• Re-creating

5. Simple and Epic
• Nations, civilizations, continents, oceans
• Times, eras, ages, centuries, cycles
• Reasonable, rational actor
• No coincidences, only causes and
consequences
• Language of Play, 'Big Game', 'Great
Chessboard', etc.
• Everyone playing God
• Geopolitical hyperreality is better than the
'real reality'

6. Answers to All Questions
• Myth is real because of its results
• Self-evident, self-sufficient
• Most natural way of dealing with the
reality
• Geopolitics stretches from Land and Sea
to the Space, Information, Cognition
• Universally applicable and explaining
• Only Religion and Conspiracy Theory
match

8. Cargo Cult Media
• South Pacific, Melanesia, Vanuatu, Tanna
• WW2, John Frum Cult, 'Kastom'
• Air plane warshipping, mimicking,
glossolalia
• Arthur Clarke's Law: 'Any developed
technology indistinguishable from magic'
• Cargo Cult is the way a myth becomes
acquainted with alien technologies and
adapts to changes

9. Re-creation of the World
• The new media do not change the myth of
geopolitics
• The myth of geopolitics re-creates itself
with the new media
• 'Divide et Impera' with new means
• A shift to another conceptual paradigm is
only possible as an independent and
unconditioned choice of free will

10. facebook.com/
AntonGumenskiy
@gmail.com